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Frauenliebe und -leben, Op 42

Introduction

This is a cycle that every Lieder singer (soprano and mezzo that is, although the baritone Julius Stockhausen sang it in 1862) will be asked to perform. No one can deny that it is a work of enduring popularity. It happens that I first came across it thirty years ago at the same time as reading the newly-published feminist polemics of Germaine Greer. After having consulted the book of translations, this fledgling accompanist immediately decried the cycle for its clumsy and patronising depiction of female feelings and behaviour: surely only a male writer could depict a woman so lacking in spirit as to debase herself in front of a man, referring to herself (in the second song) as ‘niedre Magd’ – ‘lowly maid’? How bourgeois and complacent it was of poet and composer to devote songs to the engagement ring, to the wedding ceremony, to suckling the baby and so on! Later, I noticed to my surprise that the majority of female singers had fewer qualms about these things. For female singers, male competition does not enter the workplace; rivalry can only come, by its very nature, from other women (I can think of few other professions where this applies) and sisterhood, for its own sake, is not high on their list of priorities. Indeed, it was my experience that the majority of female singers tend to revel unashamedly in the emotions of Frauenliebe und -leben, although it must be admitted that when not artists of the first rank, this can reach cloying levels of sentimentality. This has always been the danger of the piece, and the trap for the performer.

It is sometimes the fate of works that are advanced for their time to be damned by later generations for not being radical enough. From the standpoint of Schumann’s time, the Chamisso cycle should be recognised and saluted as a remarkably forward-looking work, written by a man with an impeccable, and almost modern, attitude to human rights – indeed a man who supported the concept of female emancipation. On the work’s publication in 1831 (soon after the revolution in Paris which swept away the Bourbon monarchy and promised equality for all) the poet was greeted as the champion of women, and the work went into seventeen editions in as many years. Against the fashions of the time, Chamisso gave the role of the narrator to the woman, and she speaks for herself, in her own voice, from the beginning. She has the right to describe her feelings and, as shy as she is, she tells us why she finds the man attractive in the second song – his lips and eyes are as delectable as his gentle nature. In the sixth song she has already taken over the reins of household management, and announces her pregnancy to the astounded husband who hears the news very much on her terms. In the next song she pities men for not being able to know the joys of motherhood – suckling the child is openly mentioned, and celebrated, which was far from usual for the time. By the time she reaches the final song (in Schumann’s cycle) she has developed into a formidable personality, capable of dealing with her bereavement in a way that convincingly includes anger as part of the range of emotions. In Chamisso’s closing poem (not set by Schumann, but here read by Juliane Banse) it is clear that the mother has brought up her daughter successfully without compromising her integrity and her belief in the power of love. It is little wonder that the work was a wild success with its women readers, and that Chamisso was proud enough of his cycle of poems to place it at the head of his collected works.

All of this still leaves open the question as to why the protagonist should be so tentative in the beginning, so star-struck and servile. And the answer here makes Chamisso’s achievement even more remarkable, because he is writing about that most difficult of relationships in nineteenth-century life, a love affair across the class- and wealth barriers. This is not a courtship of equals taken from the pages of a Jane Austen novel where the heroine is able to answer her suitors back with healthy aplomb. Instead we have a girl who refers to herself as lowly not because of her sex, but because the object of her affection appears to be completely out of her reach in terms of his social position. She is even prepared selflessly to bless, in the second song, the woman of higher birth who will make him a suitable wife. It seems inevitable that she should suffer with a broken heart while watching him build a life with someone from his own background.

Stefan Zweig in Die Welt von gestern describes how the Viennese rich imported domestic staff from country villages to provide sexual partners safe from disease for their sons. One feels that the abandoned maidservant in the famous Mörike poem Das verlassene Mägdlein is probably pregnant by the son of her employer. When Chamisso’s heroine refers to herself as a ‘Magd’ she could be referring to herself as a maidservant, below stairs, and within the same house as the object of her adoration. The first song suggests that she sees him daily, as if in a waking dream, which would fit the scenario of a domestic servant’s relationship with the son of the house. When she looks back on her former life in the fourth song (Du Ring an meinem Finger) she seems to have much in common with the poor governess Jane Eyre: ‘Alone I found myself in boundless desolation’, she says. It was common enough for the poor to be the sexual playthings of the rich, but marriage was another matter. It is for this reason that our heroine can scarcely believe that he has chosen her as a bride, and that she claims that he has elevated and blessed here with his love. This does not refer to the elevation of a poor woman, per se, but to the triumph of love when a well-born young man insists on disregarding the social convention whereby he is allowed a mistress from the working-class, but not a wife. We are not told the social consequences of this marriage – we certainly hear nothing of his family. It is possible that he has been disinherited. This may account for the reference to her relatives (and not his) at the wedding (the fifth song), to the powerful sense of intimacy and emotional fragility on his part in the sixth, and to the feeling of her utter loneliness in the final song when she seems unsupported by anyone else on her husband’s death. Chamisso defied convention all his life, and it would make sense, in the context of his own sympathy for working-class characters (his poems are full of them) that this couple had done the same.

On the other hand one must beware of apologising for the different significance of marriage in another century. There is no doubt that the concept of duty and obedience to her husband would have been a natural part of Clara Wieck’s thinking, and also what Schumann would have expected as head of the house. The work was written in the same month as he made a down payment on a flat for his bride-to-be, and in the greatest expectation of the cosy marital bliss that is to be found depicted on some of these pages, a song cycle which takes place in the unique milieu of living-room and bedroom. Woven into this dream of cosy normality, however, we have fragments of Schumann’s own past which also played their part in his sympathy with the poems. Nine years older than Clara, the composer had already had his share of romantic adventures. In 1831 in Leipzig (as it happened, in the same year and town of these poems’ publication) Schumann had had an affair with a girl, poor and illiterate, who revered him and whose attitude to him could not have been far from the sentiments expressed in this cycle’s opening songs. He did not marry her, but perhaps, if he had resembled Chamisso’s wordless suitor and husband, he might have done so. The name of ‘Christel’ features fleetingly in Schumann’s diaries, but her ghost hovers through these pages side-by-side with the dominating presence who was the source of inspiration for so much music, the indomitable, the extraordinary, the far from servile Clara Wieck. It should also be noted that Schumann was not the first to set this cycle. That honour belonged to Carl Loewe in 1836.

Recordings

'The performances give unalloyed pleasure. Lott's still-radiant soprano combines beautifully with the vibrant, musky mezzo of Kirchschlanger, while Jo ...'I'll leave you to experience the conjuring for yourself. For conjuring it is: any element of the didactic is totally absent in this seamless garment ...» More

Schumann’s songs are among the greatest musical achievements of the nineteeth century, and this is the perfect release with which to mark the composer’s 200th birthday. This marvellous collection comprises Schumann’s complete songs, presented for ...» More

'An unqualified success … a glorious interpreter, warm-voiced and wholly in sympathy with the task in hand. The famous cycle Frauenliebe und Lebe ...'The care that has gone into the literary and musicological side of the project is perfectly matched by the musical results. Banse proves to be a wond ...» More

The opening chords, piano and mezzo staccato, are shy and humble. This is perhaps something to do with the feeling of almost religious veneration engendered by the tonic-subdominant progression. Reverence for the nameless ‘ihn’ is instantly conveyed. It is astonishing that such a succession of chords (I - IV - V7) could be as potent as this, for in this scrap of melody we have the instantly recognisable beginning of one of the most celebrated of all lieder cycles. This accompaniment literally takes the singer by the hand and guides her through the song, gently shadowing the vocal line here, and anticipating it there; in every respect it offers support. This is the solicitude offered to someone in shock, someone who has been temporarily blinded, and can only move from one place to another with the guidance and the evidence of her own fingertips. Indeed, these carefully placed mezzo staccato chords imply someone tentatively feeling their way through the song.

The tempo marking of Larghetto (Schumann is seldom very helpful, or exact, in regard to tempo markings) can sometimes suggest a funereal tempo which makes the girl sound merely sanctimonious, and certainly not young. The singer (especially if the song is transposed to a lower key) has to beware a matronly heaviness to which this music can easily succumb if it is not kept on the move. It must seem to aspire to the light of a brighter star, and move forward as if pulled in that direction by an invisible force. In musical terms it is a sarabande, and the pianist should not forget that a dance, however grave, is a thing of movement and progress, The piano provides certain moments of eloquent commentary: after the opening words –‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ – note the heartfelt chord, accented as if to emphasise a pang of emotion; after ‘blind zu sein’, the punctuation of a slightly tremulous and disorientated syncopation which speaks volumes for the girl’s state of mind, resigned and yet somehow expectant; the way the piano quits the singer’s own tessitura for the first time, leaving her to float ‘schwebt sein Bild mir vor’ with a new transparent clarity, the harmony, built on ambiguous sevenths, anchoring the phrase in the warmer reaches of the bass clef without bringing her down to earth.

And then the miracle of the song – the setting of ‘taucht aus tiefstem Dunkel heller, heller nur empor’ the musical and emotional scope of which seem suddenly, and unexpectedly, daring after the reticence of the opening. The word ‘tiefstem’ plunges a full seventh within a melisma obviously created to illustrate the adjective’s meaning, but the stirrings of the bass line, and the proliferation of suspensions in the piano part, like so many newly-developed emotional ties, suggest the simultaneous deepening of emotions which the girl has not known before. This is surely music for the growing-pains of the soul as it spreads its wings. The singer seems to mature before our very ears as she ponders a new and painful awakening. (Schumann makes this marvellous musical phrase fit the poet’s words by a repetition of ‘heller’.) The interrupted cadence on the last syllable (‘empor’) was apparently not in the manuscript’s first draft, but the sonorous bass F sharp which acts as an accented passing-note onto a G minor chord catches at the heart like few other moments: nothing of this magnitude can happen to someone without pain. The hymn-book music of the opening has not prepared her (or us) for a glimpse of heaven (as she sees him in waking dream), but this vision has been bought at the expense of glimpsing the darkest abyss plumbed by that low F sharp. The piano’s eloquent echo of the vocal line (musing on, and repeating, the melody of ‘heller, heller nur empor) is in a rich and mellifluous register of the piano as if happiness has been coloured and darkened by sadness. From the start, the impossibility of the relationship is built into this music of ‘irresolution and melancholy’ (in the words of Eric Sams).

The second strophe, an exact musical repeat of the first, and not always to the benefit of the word-setting, teaches us little more about the girl we have not gathered already. Provided the interpretation is not lachrymose or awash with self-indulgent rubato, she preserves her dignity and poise. Shunning the games of her sisters (or perhaps the other young girls in service), and obviously unable to divulge her infatuation, she retires to her ‘Kämmerlein’ – the very small room that would have been assigned to her at the top of the house – and weeps. Only in the context of an impossible love does this make sense. As a youngster I remember despising Chamisso for depicting a woman in love incapable of anything but moping and weeping, but this girl is no milksop. She knows that what she longs for is out of the question, and dangerous. Thus her secret, and this intensely private music, both rapt and depressive, which conveys her dilemma as perfectly as her joy. The latter peeps out of the music here and there, despite itself.

Loewe’s 6/8 setting (also strophic) shares certain repetitive qualities suggestive of obsession and infatuation. It is well made in musical terms but his girl is quite straightforward (too much so for the words) and lacks the depths and equivocation of Schumann’s creation.

Of the songs in the cycle, this is the one which is most often to be heard as an excerpt and out of context; and it is certainly the song which has been most misunderstood by its interpreters. Although Schumann has taken care to mark the music ‘Innig, lebhaft’, this music can all too easily become, in the wrong hands, a battle-cry for an Amazon in pursuit of her prey. A song with a tune of this quality, and with such a stirring accompaniment, is too much fun for its own good. The repeated chords of the opening, despite the piano marking, tempt the enthusiastic accompanist to pound the keyboard. Thus encouraged, the trainee Valkyrie belts out phrases of dotted rhythms and diaphragm-shaking mordents that emerge as whoops of delight. In truth, until the third song, the girl has nothing to be delighted about, apart from the strength of her own feelings.

It is perhaps Schumann’s fault for having written a hit susceptible to amateur enthusiasm. But it is important to remember that the girl still inhabits a dream-world of impossible love where she can only fantasise about the man whom she finds so appealing. The key of E flat major follows naturally from the B flat major reverie of the previous song, and remains linked to that mood to a certain extent; the important word ‘Innig’ – heartfelt – is crucial to the conception. The music has a lively erotic side, certainly (hence the lively ‘Lebhaft’) – it is this which gives rise to the sinuously curving melody with its ecstatic rises and swooning falls, to the embellishments in the vocal line, and to the open-hearted generosity of the music’s broad sweep, but all these considerations are tempered by the pudeur of a girl who, in allowing herself to dream of the man’s beauty and goodness, realises that she can expect no reciprocation.

The task of musically describing the beloved, someone both masculine and gentle, is undertaken by a composer expert in differentiating Florestan from Eusebius. ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’ is set to a roving arpeggio culminating in an ascending phrase in dotted rhythms which betoken determination and virility (all within a piano dynamic, however, as he is seen through her eyes). This in turn is tempered by the softer and more emollient romanticism worthy of Eusebius: at ‘wie so milde, wie so gut’ the gentle turn on the second ‘wie’ emphasises exactly how fine he is, how poetic and gallant in an old-fashioned way. At ‘Holde Lippen’ the piano’s left hand (hitherto content to support the voice in phlegmatic octaves) enlivens the texture with echoing affirmation of the vocal line, tiny flourishes in dotted rhythms which set the seal on her catalogue of admiration, as well as providing a tiny frisson of sensual excitement.

This moment of physicality is soon over, however, an avowal of sexual attraction which seems public but which is, in fact, still deeply private – the girl’s secret joy which brings her anguish in equal measure. The music of transition is a four-bar interlude where the piano music is derived from the melody of the opening. An arpeggio based on B flat 7 stretches heavenward for a moment (in response to ‘hehr und fern’) but, remembering its station, returns to the middle of the keyboard and that mood, combining happiness and dutiful resignation, which is often to be found in Schumann’s music. At the third strophe (‘Wandle, wandle deine Bahnen’) there is a new vocal melody, caressing and tender, and rising in impassioned sequences, addressed to the loved one as if face-to-face. The piano takes up the same tune and repeats it in canon, signifying that she will be content to follow her adored one at a respectful distance. At ‘nur in Demut’ (that word’s meaning – humility – is underlined by a sudden reversion to the piano dynamic) the pulsating quavers which have been in the background since the opening bars now, for the first time, are heard in both hands of the accompaniment. The effect is of a pounding pulse, a heart pulsating and overflowing with love – note the tiny fragment of melody which flowers in the right hand after ‘betrachten’. The words ‘selig nur und traurig sein!’ bring the vocal line to a cadence, aided by a ritardando. The elongated setting of ‘sein’ (always a challenge to the singer’s breath) and the change of harmony underneath it in the middle of the bar, convey the ambivalence of her feelings – in the changing harmonic colours we hear shades of both ‘selig’ and ‘traurig’.

‘Höre nicht mein stilles Beten’ (the poem’s fourth strophe) reverts to the melody of the opening, but with a crucial softening. Instead of an unadorned E flat major, the addition of a D flat changes the chord to the third inversion of E flat 7. In Blondels Lied the young minstrel strains to hear King Richard’s distant voice to the harmony of a dominant seventh; here the injunction not to listen similarly implies a song going for nothing, and resounding in the forlorn open spaces. The words ‘stilles Beten’ are also harmonised in gentler fashion in comparison to the determined plunging seventh of the opening at ‘der Herrlichste von allen’. On the words ‘darfst mich niedre Magd nicht kennen’ the melody takes an entirely new turn. When the girl refers to herself as a lowly maid, the performers are faced with the challenge of not making the music sound grimly triumphant (as has been the case in countless performances). The florid technical demands of ‘Hoher Stern der Herrlichkeit’, words which are set in a higher, star-like tessitura and are sung twice in almost operatic fashion, once again test the performers skill. We must never lose sight of the central character, but it is here, and in the following section, that the would-be Valkyrie is likely to emerge.

‘Nur die Würdigste von allen’ begins the section which is a hymn of praise to another woman, the imaginary well-born consort-to-be. It is here perhaps that Chamisso pushes his luck in depicting his heroine’s selflessness. Schumann gets carried away to the extent of giving the most passionate music (and highest note) to the girl’s blessing on ‘deine Wahl’ – the Other Woman in the girl’s imaginary scenario where her beloved will choose someone else. But this passage also contains many subtle touches; if the voice makes joyful sallies, as if putting a brave face on events, the piano’s drooping sighs (four of these – suspensions on falling seconds initiated by lachrymose minims) remind us of the emotional cost. It is an almost impossible task to capture musically the complexities of these emotions: words of opposite meaning such as ‘freuen’ und ‘weinen’ occur within a bar of each other; at one moment she declares herself joyful, at the next she tells us that her heart is breaking. Her struggle is that of a good German girl attempting to do the right thing, struggling to remember that true love chooses the beloved’s good, wherever that may lie. This self-abnegation is extremely difficult for her, as for anyone, and the composer provides us with important clues. The whole of the section remains in a shy piano dynamic, yet in ignoring this some performers make the high notes an excuse for something loud and fulsome. The words ‘viele tausendmal’ are set in a type of musical parenthesis, and the harmonies suggest rueful emotion – even after blessing the rival thousands of times, she will not be able to make herself truly rejoice; the ambivalence of this is also regularly ignored. How many times have we heard the ‘freuen’ delivered with a dazzling smile, and ‘selig, selig bin ich dann’ as if in an ecstasy of happiness? Of course this makes the heartbreak of ‘brich, O Herz, was liegt daran?’ (a remarkably apt setting of a tearful question, with just the right interrogative lift at the end of the sentence) seem insincere or perfunctory.

Chamisso’s poem actually ends here, and Loewe follows suit and ends his song with these words. As a result, the opening words of the next poem then make perfect sense when the girl is astounded to discover that she is loved in return. But Schumann cannot resist a return to the words and music of the opening. After ‘was liegt daran?’, three exquisite bars of interlude lovingly explore all three piano registers – high, low and middle – employing the familiar dotted-rhythm motto as if she were allowing herself to think of ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’ in different lights and contexts, as well as herself in relationship to him. After this, the concluding verse is often performed with redoubled assurance and power, as if clinching the deal (sadly, there has been no ‘deal’ in the first place), brushing up the pieces of broken heart with no difficulty, and gleefully singing the praises of eyes and lips within seconds of the music of heartbreak. Unless handled carefully, this makes complete nonsense of what has gone before, as well as rendering inexplicable the girl’s surprise in the next song that she is the chosen one.

A closer look at the music shows that Schumann intended a mood which makes the girl’s disbelief at the beginning of Ich kann’s nicht fassen both believable and touching. When we hear ‘Er, der herrlichste von allen’ sung for the last time, Schumann sets the phrase a third lower than at the beginning. Sadly, this encourages many a singer to use a booming chest register to risible effect. But the music is meant to sound less, not more, certain. The brightness of E flat major has been replaced by C major with the chastening addition of a B flat, the ambiguous seventh chord. Indeed, the whole of this section depicts a burst bubble, a fantasy that she realises she has to let go. The tempo is the same, but the colour has changed completely. She bids her farewell to the dream with a lingering and crestfallen repeat of the music; she lingers over ‘wie so milde, wie so gut’ in the ritardando as if to emphasise that these qualities are even more meaningful to her than his physical attributes.

The postlude (initiated by those sighing suspensions in seconds from the central section) is a beautiful inspiration: in the final four bars, quavers, interwoven in close imitative counterpoint, stretch to the heights of the keyboard and gradually dissolve, like a daydream, as the music meanders, gently resigned, down the stave. Various strands of fantasy unravel one by one and leave a single thread of wistful feeling in the left hand to usher in the final cadence. If this is performed with humility and in a spirit of selfless valediction, the news that will change her life will come as a real surprise.

For the first time in the cycle a forte dynamic appears and, with it, the marking ‘Mit Leidenschaft’ – passionately. This song has to crown ‘Er, der herrlichste von allen’, not be dwarfed by it. The man has said to her ‘I am yours forever’, and it is this astonishing news which marks the turning point in the girl’s life, and her pathway to womanhood. In the skipping rhythm we hear a trace of the ‘Schwester Spiele’, the sisterly games referred to in the first song (no longer blinded by love, she has rediscovered her energy); but grafted on to this girlish childhood Bewegung, similar to that in the Eichendorff song Die Stille, we hear develop, before our very ears, a note of maturity and depth of emotional response that is founded on reality, not fairytale. The short, sharp shock of the opening is meant to bring us back to the real world after some minutes of daydreaming. Loewe chooses a 6/8 rhythm and the key of A major to relate this turn of events in amiable fashion, but Schumann is the greater lieder composer because he is armed with greater imagination and psychological understanding. She tells us of this great event breathlessly as if surprised, and not a little frightened. But the mood of the piece changes bar by bar, and is shot through with as many colours as a piece of finely-woven cloth under changing light. There is so much to consider, she seems to be saying, so many things to think about now that everything has changed.

Thus we hear minor-key panic in the opening two lines of the poem, for this revelation has been a shock to the system. The staccato of the accompaniment has the crispness of a sharp intake of breath. Imagine, too, the short, sharp hand-clasping movements necessary if one were attempting to catch hold of or grasp (‘fassen’) a bird in flight. The fingers would make a similarly short, staccato sound. In a sense those chords are played in the futile hope of catching a thought as elusive and incomprehensible as that man loving this woman. The passing possibility of deception (soon discounted) is illustrated by the diminished-seventh chord on ‘berückt’. And then a touch of joyful defiance, even cockiness, for the vocal grace note on ‘unter allen’ signifies a spring in her step, and that she has scotched the female competition. She has only had phantom rivals of her own imagining, but she has vanquished them nevertheless. She can still refer to herself as ‘mich Arme’ but the act of raising her up to a different station occasions a lift of a fourth in the vocal line (at ‘erhöht’); the act of blessing her, a plunge of a fifth as if laying her safely to rest in the safety of home key.

Schumann now creates the equivalent of a musical oasis, a space specially prepared (Etwas langsamer) within the body of the music to house a sacred memory. The piano music is full of long notes and ties (as in Seit ich ihn gesehen at ‘taucht aus tiefstem Dunkel’). Just as visions of the beloved have appeared to float before her in disembodied fashion, so does his voice when recalled and imitated. But she is not afraid to re-live the moment of his confession of love. In music that approaches the informality and intimacy of recitative, she recounts what he has said to her, although she has been so moved by it that she can scarcely trust her ears or her memory. But with this news assimilated, she begins to blossom, and this adds a touch of vocal expansiveness and confidence (at ‘es kann ja nimmer so sein’) even as she protests that what is happening cannot be true. It is the music which sets our mind at rest and settles her doubts; these major-key harmonies seem to be affirming ‘Yes it can’.

Chamisso’s third (and last) verse talks of a sort of pre-Wagnerian Liebestod (‘O lass im Traume mich sterben’), but this passionately expressed sentiment is unashamedly voiced in the major key. In her determination to die ‘gewieget an seiner Brust’ we sense an unmistakable will-power born of erotic passion. We have glimpsed this in Er, der Herrlichste von allen, but here she speaks with a newly-won frankness. The words ‘In Tränen unendlicher Lust’ (marked by the composer ‘Adagio’) would have made a mawkish close to the song (as they do in Loewe). In order to show that the girl has been carried away into hyperbole by the strength of her emotion, Schumann alleviates the embarrassment of the imagery and cleverly throws away these lines as soon as he sets them. He does this by eliding the word ‘Lust’ with the return of the faster tempo, and the short, sharp chords of the opening.

The song’s first fifteen bars (with upbeat) are now repeated. These are followed by an exceptionally effective little interlude for piano which suggests, in its gently rocking rhythm, a game of sorts – a sort of internalised ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. The pianist’s little finger stretches up to an F at the summit of the musical phrase, and four bars later up to an A flat. Even this is not high enough to grasp and encompass the amazing fact of being loved as one would have dreamed. The voice enters with yet another (and final) ‘Ich kann’s nicht fassen, nicht glauben’ and underneath this last word the pianist launches himself up to a high C which at last seems to take in, and grasp, the enormous significance of the man’s pronouncement. The effort involved in this mental adjustment is reflected in the stretch and distance it represents for the pianist’s right hand. After the harmonic crunch on ‘es hat’, the succession of accompanying chords beneath ‘ein Traum mich berückt’ seem to resolve progressively, each bar presenting a less murky picture of the truth, as if clouds were clearing from the sky. ‘Berückt’ is now no longer a verb to fear: each new bar moves nearer clarity and peace. Three bars from the end a plagal cadence (F major - C major) leads to the broad and hushed arpeggio in the accompaniment with which all doubt is at last laid to rest.

Hugo Wolf liked this song enough to model his Verborgenheit on its confessional mood, its E flat major tonality, its sinuous accompaniment with its open fifths in the left hand, and its ABA structure. But Du Ring an meinem Finger is perhaps the song that has caused the most opprobrium to be heaped on this cycle. There is something about one’s own engagement ring (like one’s own baby) which engenders a flood of sentiment which seems ridiculous when viewed from outside the perimeter of the happy events. This was the song which Kathleen Ferrier sang, accompanied by Bruno Walter, during which she contemplated an imaginary ring on her finger, and for which she was chastised in the press by Neville Cardus. Perhaps this great artist felt she needed to do something to enliven the proceedings, for it is a static moment in the cycle where reflection gives rise to some unfashionable eulogies, by today’s standards at least. Yet the tone of the correspondence between Robert and Clara Schumann fits this song perfectly: Clara’s devotion and determination to love, obey and serve her husband are made clear time and again. If a strong-minded, highly educated and talented woman should feel comfortable with the concept of ‘ihm dienen, ihm leben, ihm angehören ganz’ (as the song has it) it is little wonder that these words struck a chord with so many women of the time who nevertheless regarded Chamisso as a reforming and modernising writer.

We return to the key of E flat, and it was clearly part of Schumann’s plan for this cycle that the second and fourth songs, separated by a C minor scherzo, should be mirror images of each other – Er, der Herrlichste von allen more youthful and passionate, Du Ring an meinem Finger imbued with a new sense of maturity and responsibility. This deepening of emotion is even reflected in the tessitura: parts of the cycle lie uncomfortably low for soprano, but Du Ring an meinem Finger, in its original key of E flat, hugs the lower reaches of the stave, suggesting the timbre of a mezzo soprano This makes the two songs seem very different, but Eric Sams (in The Songs of Robert Schumann) convincingly demonstrates how closely they are related in terms of similar turns of phrase. It is as if Schumann has adapted the material of the second song in order to make the fourth; indeed, one might use the metaphor of refashioning or adapting an item of old jewellery to make it fit, and fit for, the new bride.

And we are even allowed to see this ring in the song’s opening. The left-hand semibreves in the first bar of the accompaniment proudly display two opulent open circles of sound to fit the outstretched hand. (Hugo Wolf puns on the word ‘Ring’ in the same visual way at the end of his mighty Grenzen der Menschheit.) That image occurs only once, at the very beginning. After this, the song commences as if accompanied by a parlour harmonium of modest compass; it is the paradigm of domesticity, the vocal line following the accompaniment dutifully, the piano writing humble and reflective, though full of feeling. Schumann has managed to write into the very fabric of this song his concept of, and longing for, safe domestic bliss. The girl feels herself rescued from her past when she existed ‘im öden unendlichen Raum’. Loneliness has been swept away by prospects of a shared life. The music clings and adheres, the physical proximity of voice and piano a metaphor for closeness and warmth. The courtship chamber is cosily heated, and there is many an embrace; but the proprieties are at first strictly observed. Then things get out of hand: the quickening music in the fourth verse (marked ‘nach und nach rascher’) clothes those controversial words of marital duty with harmonic progressions which suggest the quickening pulse of sexual excitement. It seems that serving and belonging, as well as being transfigured, are all exciting pastimes – even contemplating them makes the pulses race. But then, the rationalisation of desire as wifely duty is what one would expect of a respectable nineteenth-century fiancée. In Helft mir, ihr Schwestern, the bride-to-be tells of the moments of sexual impatience on the part of her beloved who can scarcely wait for the wedding day. Schumann himself was impatient for Clara in the same way.

Schumann, as is often his practice in this cycle, chooses to repeat the poem’s first verse. The return to the contemplation of the ring from the great climactic rise and fall of the song’s middle section is achieved with scarcely a pause for breath. One has the feeling that the woman (and the music) make the greatest effort to pull themselves together before things go too far. This music is, on the whole, so successful in depicting Germanic respectability that it seems an embodiment of the Biedermeier virtues almost to the point of parody.

Despite this, it deserves to be stripped of its varnish, the accretions of decades of sloppy self-indulgent performances, and looked at afresh. It contains countless tiny felicities, above all in the response to words. It is Schumann’s genius to be able to fashion a vocal line where the rise and fall of the melody, and the stretches between syllables, words and ideas seem both inevitable and revelatory. For a person with little vocal background in his formative years (how unlike Schubert he was in this regard) he has a remarkably sensuous response to the luscious ebb and flow of a phrase as if it were a living thing with a will of its own. Thus the notes of this song’s opening phrase rise and fall in alternation, but the climactic point of the phrase is the lowest note – ‘Finger’. In this depth of tessitura we feel how deeply she has responded to this change in her life, and the withdrawal into privacy suggested by the shape of the phrase makes us the privileged viewers of something shown only to close friends. This is but one example of Schumann’s husbandry of words: he lovingly nourishes them, fills them out, transfigures them. To do this, he provides a blueprint for a flow of sound where breath unites with intelligence. But he also understands the visceral miracle at the heart of singing as the vocal chords cry out with the pain of what it is to be human. One has to love the voice to write for it; perhaps one has to love the singer too. And to write something for and about someone in love (as in this song) all the above apply. The postlude is one of the cycle’s best; like the celebrated Nachspiel of Widmung we are privy to the composer’s own feelings of veneration for the bride-to-be. At the same time the music’s gentle repetitions perfectly convey the dreamy, aimless contemplations of the woman’s present love and future happiness.

This is the most public of the songs in the cycle, and its change of mood and tempo come as a relief after four songs of a more private nature. In Widmung (the first song in the Myrthen cycle) Robert Schumann had declared his love for Clara Wieck to the world; here the young husband and wife-to-be have come to declare their love in a wedding ceremony before God. So it is little surprise that these two songs, both concerned with an important occasion and consecration of marriage, should have similar accompaniments which bustle with pianistic fanfares that suggest pomp and ceremony. The result is both joyful and serious, celebratory and full of the deepest emotion.

The key is B flat major and, in coming full circle, it is the culmination of what might be termed a cycle-within-a-cycle of the first five songs that has progressed in the following way: B flat - E flat - C minor - E flat - B flat. The tempo marking is C, Ziemlich schnell. Sometimes one hears the song really fast – one in a bar – with the singer encompassing four bars in one breath. This whirlwind approach is not convincing; if the composer had wanted an alla breve tempo he would have asked for it. This is no shotgun wedding, and the tempo of the opening should match that of the march at the close of the song (still a brisk four-in-a-bar, nevertheless). Only then are we able to hear, and enjoy, details that Schumann has included in the music and which can easily be lost in the scramble to the altar. In the opening lines of the song there are simply too many syllables crammed into the lines to gabble them; the poet has deliberately created this word-music, rich in explosive consonants and breathless in metre, to suggest the sound of excited female chatter as the bride dresses for the ceremony. The finishing touch is the garland of myrtle, the German symbol of marriage, which bedecks her brow. Like all great song composers, Schumann has chosen a motif for the accompaniment which seems appropriate for a variety of images: lighthearted impatience certainly, also girlish high spirits; but with the words ‘Windet geschäftig / Mir um die Stirne’ we hear that the act of winding a garland around her forehead seems equally appropriate for the Bewegung of music which also seems to be going around in circles.

At the beginning of the second verse the vocal line proceeds as if this were a strophic song, but the piano writing changes: quavers continue in the middle voices while the outer settle into longer sustained notes. At ‘sonst dem Geliebten im Arme lag’ there is a line of syncopated quavers jangling in the tenor line and marked sforzato. Once again various interpretations of this are possible – these pulsating left-hand quavers could betoken the lover’s panting impatience. Taken together, however, these pianistic devices suggest a tintinnabulation of pealing bells, some in slower rhythm, and others more agitated. (If we choose, we can hear church bells a-ringing, calling the congregation to the ceremony, from the very beginning of the song – the peal of the bell on the first beat, the remaining quavers reverberating within its nimbus). The third strophe depicts the maidenly trepidation at what lies ahead on the wedding night; it is typical of Chamisso that he should broach this subject from the woman’s point of view (it is not impossible that she was, as were many of this poem’s readers, ill-informed of what to expect). Schumann chooses not to rise to the bait and make too much of it. The desire to receive her beloved conquers all uncertainty, and the music for this strophe is an exact repeat of the first.

In the fourth strophe we hear a new colour, a moment of introspection and, musically, a return to the world of Er, der Herrlichste von allen. Mezzo staccato quavers reintroduce, and gently propel, a vocal line which is radiant with expectant joy, but this time it is not a daydream. The strength of the left-hand minims underpinning these female flutterings remind us of the man’s reliability, and the turn on ‘deinen Schein’ of his gallantry. But there is a new confidence and assurance about her reactions: the settings of ‘Andacht’ and ‘Demut’ (reverence and humility) rise confidently up the stave rather than wilt submissively (compare the way ‘Demut’ bends meekly in on itself with a subito piano in Er, der Herrlichste von allen). The setting of the verb ‘verneigen’ reaches out to one of the highest note of the song in direct contradiction of its meaning; it no longer occurs to her to bend the knee. He is no longer the unattainable ideal, he is an equal partner in a relationship where one senses she will have much to say. Loewe’s setting of this poem is one of the best and most imaginative of his cycle, but he sets these words in a more obvious manner – within a ritardando and with descending phrases that suggest abasement. There is a feeling of hard-won triumph over adversity in Schumann’s setting of the last word of the verse (‘mein’) which lasts six beats and which is tied over into the beginning of the song’s final verse. Underneath the tenacious radiance of the voice we hear, once again, the ceremonial motif of the opening accompaniment.

The final strophe begins as before. Only at ‘Aber euch, Schwestern, grüss ich mit Wehmut’ is there a remarkable sideways shift into the key of G flat major, the tonic of B flat becoming the third of the new key. This two-bar excursion is an unexpected and masterful interpolation, a vivid depiction of intimacy and tender regret which the composer requires to be sung within a ritardando. It catches exactly the right scale of sadness – not nearly enough to make our heroine have serious regrets on her joyous day, but enough to make her linger a moment with a smile and a hug for her beloved sisters, and to kiss her girlhood goodbye. This is Schumann at his most poetic and imaginative – one may also say at his most considerate, for who can deny that throughout this cycle there are many signs of the composer’s own gentlemanly kindness? The recapturing of the main tempo at ‘freudig scheidend aus eurer Schar’ shows her ultimate joy and determination despite any previous trepidation. And then there is the wedding march. One can almost be certain that the composer had the music from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in mind. After all, the whole cycle is a Mendelssohnian work in terms of its Leipzig-based domesticity. Schumann views the wedding ceremony from the vantage point of the younger girls left behind at the back of the church. The ceremonial procession moves away from him (and us) in a long diminuendo. The ceremonial strains become thinner and less audible.

The end of this song is neither triumphant nor ebullient. There is no ritardando, but the piano ends on a first inversion of a B flat major chord which leaves the future open to question. In actual fact that bass note of D, the mediant of B flat major but also the dominant of G major, is the harmonic key to what will happen in the couple’s new phase of life. For the first time we are moving house tonally, and domestic happiness is to be depicted in sharp, rather than flat, keys.

This song deals with a subject which was considered too delicate for open discussion in nineteenth-century life. This pudeur even affected Chamisso who does not allow his heroine to announce her news in a straightforward manner in the body of the poem. The fact is that the young bride has recently discovered that she is pregnant. We must imagine that her husband has discovered her weeping for happiness. Concerned, as ever, for her well-being, he cannot understand why. ‘What is wrong?’, he says, – ‘What is the matter? You don’t seem to be upset; indeed, you are smiling through the tears. Why, then, are you crying?’

It is here that the music begins. As if in answer to these bewildered but loving questions, the song opens up like a flower, petal by exquisite petal. In the first bar, the piano’s right hand alone on a third – D and F sharp. This chord has emerged from the pivotal harmony (on D and B flat) at the end of the last song, and will lead us away from the flat keys of the songs of courtship and marriage ceremony. The right hand thumb slides, via C sharp, down to a C natural and then a D7 chord underpinned, in the second bar, by an open fifth in the left hand – G and D. In this state of blissful suspension the voice enters on ‘Süsser’, a beautiful and soothing word which resolves on to ‘Freund’ as the harmony itself resolves into G major. In this locking of harmonies, like a glance which seeks, then receives, reassurance, Schumann has found a wonderful tonal analogue for complicity – the interrogatory of love, the wordless communication of partners who only have eyes for each other. Momentary angst is soothed as soon as various questions, posed by the absence of the wavering tonic, are answered by its reappearance. In this way there is continual tension and relaxation in this opening section: new doubts are countered and dissolved by the husband’s support, moment of fear at what lies ahead in the pregnancy are counterpointed with the serenity and peace of her emotional security.

This is the only song in the cycle which features the man’s physical presence, and Schumann makes the most of it. The husband is denied a singing voice in the proceedings but the switch of the piano writing to the bass clef after ‘verwundert an’ establishes his place in the dialogue. Throughout the song’s first two strophes the opening motif is repeated in treble and bass clefs in alternation, the lower version in the cello register registering masculine support and encouragement, a gentle squeeze of the hand, as if to help the woman find the words she is seeking. He still does not realise that he is to be a father. This music is a remarkable mixture of recitative and arioso, half melody and half speech, and it perfectly conveys the intimacy of bedroom confidences. The mezzo staccato crotchets under ‘ungewohnte Zier’ are teardrops in the best Schubertian tradition. In the second strophe, under ‘hier an meiner Brust’, they seem to underline the considerate gentleness of a man who embraces his wife, uncertain of what ails her, with concern rather than passion. The setting of ‘will in’s Ohr dir flüstern alle meine Lust’ is particularly affecting with the highest note of the song so far reserved for ‘flüstern’; well sung, this tiny excursion upwards is a marvel of intimacy, with just a hint of smiling, even teasing, pleasure in the forthcoming revelation.

The interlude is a mighty challenge for the pianist, for it contains the words that the poet was too delicate to put into the mouth of the mother-to-be. It can easily go for nothing, merely a bridge passage giving the woman time to whisper the happy tidings. But Schumann meant it to be more than that. As it moves in sequences upwards through the stave, this is music for a dawning realisation. We do not hear her words, but we hear his reaction to them. The unrealistic hairpin markings on the minim chords, first on D7, then on G7, culminating in an ecstatic semibreve on the second inversion of G7 (with a similarly impossible request for a crescendo and diminuendo within that one held chord), imply that the composer invested each of these progressions with mounting significance: in this dumb show, disbelief yields to the wide-eyed assimilation of the news, followed by a joyful embrace of gratitude. One would need an accompaniment of strings to realise fully the composer’s musical intentions for these swells of emotion.

‘Now do you understand my emotion?’ she says. And the music moves into a duet where the husband’s interjections are represented by sighing phrases of cello-like melody which are given over to the pianist’s left hand. The woman’s sentence is broken up as if she succumbs to tears of emotion between phrases; the man’s soothing words, or gestures, dovetail with the various fragments of her aria. Now that he knows the reason for her feelings, she can allow herself to weep openly. The music has moved into C major and the plagal implications of the modulation are ideally suited to what seems to be the couple’s holy moment. The setting of ‘du geliebter, geliebter Mann?’ is a marvel of tenderness; this moment, when both of the pianist’s hands come together in palpitating quavers, recalls the mixed emotion of ‘Selig nur und traurig sein’ in the cycle’s second song.

There now follows something of a set-piece aria, a song-within-a-song where she establishes, once and for all, her new-found strength; in pressing him ever closer to her breast, she is offering protection and solace as much as requiring it for herself. The composer calls for the music to move faster (Lebhafter), and the pianist begins to sing his heart out with a familiar melody. One can usually trust this composer to find an apposite musical quote from his pantheon of musical allusions, but the sixth song of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte seems, at first, a curious choice. Schumann had already reworked the melody to memorable effect at the end of the first movement of his C major Fantasy Op 17 – on that occasion also in C major. (It seems likely that Schumann knew the song cycle in its printed transposition of C major rather than the original key of E flat.) ‘Nimm sie hin denn diese Lieder’ says the composer (Schumann as well as Beethoven) – ‘accept these songs’ – everything that I create is yours and, because you are my muse, everything that I write has come to life through you. (Hugo Wolf said much the same to Melanie Köchert about his songs). Süsser Freund is a song about another sort of shared creation where the singer is neither composer nor poet but the creator-mother, the composer of a new human being; the father is her muse – as if she might sing to him ‘Nimm es hinn denn, dieses Kind’. The child is her masterpiece, and it is her gift to him. Empowered by nature, her aptitude for her new task grows mightily: at ‘dass ich fest and fester nur dich drücken mag’ the music reaches new levels of confidence and elation.

A short bridge passage leads back to the poem’s last strophe, and plans for the future. The music is that of the opening once again – here earnestly seeking approval and agreement for all the choices and decisions that have to be made together. The child’s cradle will stand by the bed. Either they are not a rich couple, or this child is to be brought up in the modern manner, near to its mother and not in a distant nursery. The woman cannot wait for the day until her dream will be realised – a child that will look back at her with the face of its father. The postlude is typical of Schumann who, at moments like these, can be counted on to provide a moment of magic. It is fashioned from materials already used, and is reminiscent of the music with which the expectant mother broke the news to her husband, with the addition of a marvellous Adagio bar of dreamy suspensions which lingers in the mood of rapt tenderness and expectation. Schumann seems to have been especially touched by the words ‘dein Bildnis’ which he, not Chamisso, repeats. This has the effect of emphasising that, however much she is taken by the idea of a child, the beauty of her man still lies at the centre of her dream. (The newly-married Schumann, like most husbands, was not keen to be displaced too soon by children.) It is probably too fanciful to suggest that the composer has here imagined the moment following childbirth when she wakes to greet the new child, sleepily affirming, as she does so, that it is indeed her husband’s living image … ‘dein Bildnis’. Such is the nature of the Lied that it is, like childbirth, full of contractions. As in a film, one can, at will, speed up or edit the action, flash back or fast-forward. If childbirth itself makes unsuitable viewing, the child’s first embrace by its mother makes a most touching vignette.

Two chords (A7 in first inversion), the first a loud knock, the second more diffident, open the double doors of the bedchamber and lead us into the key of D major. We encounter the intimacy of a domestic scene unique in Lieder – the sight of a mother nursing and suckling her child. If Chamisso has been reticent about allowing his heroine to announce her pregnancy in so many words, he is unashamed to have her describe the joy and satisfaction of this most feminine of tasks. In the South Seas the poet would have seen, and rejoiced in, the open and unselfconscious breast-feeding of children. Until relatively recently, even in our own century, it was considered something very private, not to be done in public; at one time, many a ‘refined’ singer would have thought twice about including the cycle in her recital programmes because of the phrase ‘Nur die da säugt’. This is good to remember if we now patronise this work for being hopelessly old-fashioned. The poem is set by Schumann with charm and sensitivity; but it is surely because men (as the young mother herself is quick to point out), even the empathetic Chamisso, had not experienced these emotions for themselves. It is perhaps for this reason that this song makes a pretty picture rather than something deeper. ‘The verse offers no sustenance to the composer’ as Eric Sams puts it, and Chamisso, abreast of all recent developments in botany, can pay only lip service to something as age-old as motherhood. He chooses a versifying style of deliberate simplification – rhyming couplets. This suggests baby-talk, and hardly encourages deeper thoughts on motherhood.

In musical terms everything is lighter and airier than what has gone before, a necessary foil for the profundities of Süsser Freund. The tone of the music is set by the marking ‘Fröhlich’ (cheerful), but the word ‘Innig’ (heartfelt – a key expression for the interpretation of the whole of this cycle) tempers the mood of ebullience, and it has proved a necessary warning for performers. I have heard this song many times at breakneck speed, or even sore-nipple tempo; if someone attempts to suckle a child at the same time as moving it from side to side in rollicking fashion, accidents are bound to happen. In any case, Schumann specifically asks for three tempi in this music, each slightly faster than the one before. It is safer to begin with the Bewegung of a Wiegenlied, two rocking motions per bar, where the semiquavers fill up the musical texture and flow as gently and reliably as mother’s milk. An interesting feature of the accompaniment is the longer notes sustained by the little finger of the left hand. These underpin the vocal line, singing through the flutterings of the more transient semiquavers, and they add lustre to this little folksong melody, the chief virtue of which is the strength of the two-part writing.

There are four musical verses, each using a pair of rhyming couplets. Each of these verses comprises a melody of eight bars, the first four of which – a jingle-like tune that suggests a skipping song – remain the same for each strophe. Or nearly the same. At ‘aber jetzt’ (at the end of the third couplet and in the middle of the second musical verse) a new colour is introduced (as if in parentheses, and confidentially, a woman’s discretion in deference to men’s egos) by a tiny shift of direction, via a C natural, on the word ‘aber’. This introduces a modulation into G major, and the accompaniment moves an octave into the higher reaches of the keyboard. As she talks of something exclusively female, and exclusively to be understood by females, the composer follows suit by setting this music in an appropriately lighter and higher tessitura. At ‘Das Kind, dem sie die Nahrung giebt’ the second musical verse comes to an end. Because there is now a new tempo (Schneller) one is tempted to think of it as a new musical section. But this is simply a sign that the woman is warming to her theme, and proceeds to promulgate (with charm and humour) her doctrine of feminine superiority. Man is no longer her only source of light and life; he is rather to be pitied for his inability to know the joys and fulfilment of mother love.

In the last verse we have to assume that the child has finished feeding and that it is now playtime. Schumann asks for yet a faster tempo (Noch schneller), and this page has always been a challenging task for singers. There are so many words, and the slew of rhyming doggerel allows never a pause for breath. The sforzato and staccato chords in the accompaniment suggest that the baby is being rather brusquely bounced on the knee every half bar. (How sedate, and Victorian, the Loewe setting seems in comparison!) One may forgive Schumann (not yet a father, and probably inexperienced in the handling of children) for creating a knockabout experience for the baby that would be more appropriate for an older child.

The song is saved from nursery-jingle status at the last minute by the impassioned nature of the woman’s closing lines. The final ‘An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust’ (much of the phrase fixed on one note, as if to drive the point home) is delivered forte and, despite the surrounding levity, in a seriously engaged manner. Mother’s love is not just about running down men’s ineptitude, it is about being prepared to give your life for your child, and this we suddenly hear in a peroration where we glimpse how painful, even unthinkable, it would be for our heroine to lose this happiness. The bouncing game has not lasted long – this is swept aside by a rush of feeling where embrace is more appropriate than horseplay. There is blazing conviction in ‘Du meine Wonne’, and the slight stretching of the music at the final vocal cadence (‘du meine Lust!’) highlights the happiness of the last word – ‘Lust’ – in an unforgettable way.

This ‘Lust’, it seems to me, re-initiates playing with the baby. The postlude itself seems to suggest physical movement (like the rest of the song), and it is launched by the spread left-hand chord and right-hand arpeggio which coincide with, and complement, the ‘L’ of ‘Lust’, as well as the word’s happy meaning. This postlude is one of the cycle’s more puzzling aspects. Every pianist who has to play it must have his own ideas about what it may represent. A broadly arched phrase in flowing triplet quavers rises to a sforzato climax and subsides. And this happens twice in the same manner. This repetition suggests play to me, and there is an element of childlike laughter built into the rise and fall of those right-hand quavers. The mother holds the baby firmly by the waist and raises it above eye level before whooshing it down, as if it were in a swing on its downward trajectory. As R L Stevenson puts it: ‘Up in the air I go flying again / Up in the air and down!’. The mother laughs, and the child gurgles with delight. The high point of this journey through the air (the sforzato of Schumann’s musical phrase) is marked by a cry of ‘Wheeee’, starting in the soprano register and dropping downward with the flightpath. And the child’s delighted cries follow suit. That is the picture I have, though I admit that in real life the child’s dinner would probably make an unwelcome return on the unwise parent. Every pianist will have a different solution. It is perfectly possible, for example, to imagine the music is the rising and falling of strong waves of maternal feeling. The final two bars, ritardando, return to more gentle caresses as the child is returned to its cradle. Right at the end we hear an echo of the melody of the final ‘dein Bildnis’ from Süsser Freund. This is a sign that this child is indeed the promised article, the living incarnation of what has been a dream, one song, and only a few minutes, earlier.

The savage and forte opening chord in D minor could not come as more of a surprise. (It is a curious coincidence that Loewe’s setting also begins with a forte minim chord of D minor.) This utterly negates, at a stroke, the mood of D major domesticity that has depicted, in the previous song, the relaxed happiness of mother and child. The heavily accented opening note of the vocal line is an accusatory ‘Nun’ as if bringing the husband to account. Of course, he has never been anything else than loving, and he dies through no fault of his own. But Schumann follows the poet’s psychological understanding of the nature of bereavement: the death of a loved one gives rise to feelings of anger. The song begins as if he were guilty of betrayal, and at first the mood of this woman is hardly different from that of Ariadne left to die on Naxos, or Dido abandoned in Carthage.

Despite a real sense of drama, this is not the song of a hysterical widow – here we encounter someone of immense maturity and gravitas. Schumann gives this woman a formidable musical presence: the journey travelled since Seit ich ihn gesehen is a long one; diffidence and other-worldly idealism have yielded first to the joys, and now the bitter struggles, of the real world.
The musical style is that of a recitative without the whimsy flexibility of rubato and casual invention. Everything here is sung within an iron-clad straitjacket of rhythm; this is appropriate to the intractability of her fate where there seems little room for personal manoeuvre. The die is cast, and so be it. The vocal line itself is in mourning – too tired and grief-stricken to undertake outside engagements, and moving, if it has to, only in small intervals Often it prefers to stay fixed to one note, as if holding on to the handrails of the stave before taking the next difficult steps. But even these do not falter in terms of rhythm or determination; they progress with bravery and dignity. This is a portrait of a good and strong-willed German wife, and Schumann could not know how closely Clara was to conform to the noble picture created here.

The piano chords, percussive and embellished with extra sforzato and forte markings, suggest a number of things: anger, as we have seen; searing flashes of painful grief; the slow tolling of bells and the solemn ceremonial of burial. It is even possible to see the whole of the song played out to the background of a dead march – the dotted rhythms of ‘Schmerz getan’ and ‘unbarmherz’ger Mann’ seem gestural, the solemn left-hand octaves at ‘der aber traf’ and ‘Todesschlaf’ grand enough for the public obsequies of someone of importance. Schumann adds interesting details. For example, he ensures that the minim ‘schlaf’ (in ‘Todesschlaf’) is accompanied for only half its length by a crotchet chord – this leaves the woeful vowel betokening the sleep of the dead to resound on its own for a moment in melancholy solitude.

After six bars of intense and hard-edged public mourning we are allowed into the more tender and vulnerable realms of the woman’s mind. The diminished chord before ‘Es blicket die Verlassne vor sich hin’ is the entry point into her private grief, and fifteen of the most intense and rapt bars in any Schumann song. Dotted rhythms and portentous left-hand chords are no longer audible. The rhythm becomes more simple, the harmonies more complex. Minim chords underpin the vocal line which now wanders into some distant regions: ‘die Welt ist leer’ strays into B flat minor, the second inversion of that chord (with F in the bass) melting in particularly devastating manner into a repeat of these words (the composer’s idea, not the poet’s) on a diminished seventh with the same bass note. The world really does seem empty with two such arid harmonies at different points of the compass. At ‘Geliebet hab ich und gelebt’ there begins a long and resigned descent down the stave: love was the apex of her life’s experience, and now it seems downhill all the way.

From ‘Ich zieh mich in mein Innres still zurück’ the remainder of the song is sung within the constricted interval of a minor third: C sharp to E at the bottom of the treble stave, with one painful excursion up to a G on ‘verlornes’ She has withdrawn into the deepest and most private regions of mourning and memory. The ‘Innres still’ of which she sings is small and cramped; she is hardly able to move in the small dark space. At ‘der Schleier fällt’ the vocal line rises, rather than falls. But, after those words, the resolution of the diminished harmonies into the home key of D minor seems a miraculous tonal analogue for the falling of the veil. We are drawn even further into her grief by a sixth chord grounded on G minor, the subdominant. This unexpectedly shifts to A major, and as it does so we glimpse the radiant quality of the ‘verlornes Glück; we understand what she has lost. This last-minute discovery of a major chord is an almost unbearably poignant masterstroke on Schumann’s part. The wonderful phrase ‘Du meine Welt!’ brings the singer’s role to a close, the composer illustrating the last word with a pianissimo (yet deeply sonorous) chord of A major in a solemn bank of semibreves in the bass clef. This round white semibreve has represented a ring in the fourth song, but the orbs making up this chord are more like a solar system – the openness and light of the universe, and its boundless possibilities. When she met him, this light blinded her at first; but it rescued her from the darkness of the ‘Kämmerlein’ of the first song, and this is his enduring legacy. In finding that chord, and that word, she seems to have found a way out of the impasse of mourning. And that key, empowered by the strength of memory, now turns in the musical lock.

For a long while the pianist lingers on the fermata of that A major chord. From there it is a short but significant journey into F7, the A in the pianist’s little finger a note in common with both chords. There is an F resounding deeply in the bass, and that is the dominant of B flat major. As if drifting towards a consoling beam of light, the pianist’s right hand gently wafts up the stave touching ethereal notes in its path before changing direction and returning to a chord of B flat – the same chord which began the cycle, it seems, so long ago. The door opens and memory begins the healing process.

Part of the moving inevitability of this cyclical coup de foudre is the careful way in which Schumann has planned the key scheme for his cycle. Thus: (i) B flat major - (ii) E flat major - (iii) C minor - (iv) E flat major - (v) B flat major - (vi) G major - (vii) D major - (viii) D minor, with a return, in the postlude, to B flat major. The postlude is nothing more or less than a recapitulation, not of the song Seit ich ihn gesehen, but of its accompaniment. A lesser composer might have engineered a transcription of the song to include the vocal line; but here its exclusion is appropriate. What seems like emptiness will, in time, be filled with new melody, a different vocal obbligato, perhaps one that can be sung to the old accompaniment. Until then it is half a song for half a life. The challenges to the pianist are obvious enough. Playing like this is like broaching the recapitulation of a Schubert sonata which has already endured the transformations of a stormy development. One may not step into the same river twice, and it is not enough to play this music for a widow as if it were still for the maiden who is in love with love. The tone must deepen and somehow darken. Some of Clara Schumann’s words at the death of her own husband come to mind here – words which are both tragic and calm, grave yet collected, heartbroken but somehow in the major key:

‘On Tuesday the 29th July 1856 he was to be released from his suffering. At 4 o’clock in the afternoon he fell peacefully asleep. His last hours were quiet.’

‘His head was beautiful, the forehead so transparent and slightly arched. I stood by the body of my passionately loved husband, and was calm. All my feelings were absorbed in thankfulness to God that he was at last set free.’

But think of the memories of music that were there to sustain her, and remained to do so for the next forty years of her life!

Loewe’s cycle, published in 1836, concluded with An meinem Herzen. In the same year he composed settings of both Nun hast du mir and the final poem in Chamisso’s cycle, Traum der eignen Tage, although he did not initially judge these songs worthy of publication. The complete Loewe cycle as performed today reconstitutes the nine songs, although the last is musically anti-climactic, perhaps predictably. For reasons of poignant dramaturgy, Schumann was wise to avoid it. However the poem is read here by Juliane Ban